A Wrong-way Highway Dream

The highway dream began with ice cream.

Bowls of fresh ice cream covered a small table. There were different flavors and colors. As I checked the ice cream, I realized that some of it was blueberry. I thought, that would be tasty.

Mom was there, and my wife. Mom said, “There’s more ice cream in the freezer. The freezer’s not working so we need to get rid of all this ice cream because it’s going to melt.”

Get rid of ice cream? Why don’t we just eat it, or give it to people to eat?

Nobody wanted ice cream because they’d had too much ice cream. Cats and kittens came along. I scooped spoons of ice cream out for them to eat, which they did. Then I gave them a bowl.

Time to go. My wife and I got into a car. (I didn’t see the car at all in the dream but knew it as mine.) We were immediately on an broad, convoluted highway with many lanes. Traffic was heavy. Following signs, we ended up a hill along a long curve that went to the right.

I passed a man on a copper-colored motorcycle with a sidecar. He was in the right hand lane and I was in the middle lane. I thought my car had bumped him, and I worried. Trying to check, I couldn’t see the sides of my car. I couldn’t see any of the car, in fact, so I didn’t know where I was in the lane. This unnerved me.

I stepped on the accelerator to go faster. We were still going up a long, curving hill. The man in the copper motorcycle began passing us. I didn’t want that, so I pressed harder on the accelerator. Still going up the curve, we began slowing down, going slower and slower until we pulled into a place where the highway ended and stopped.

I didn’t understand. The highway had ended. How the hell did we end up here? My wife and I got out of the car to ask questions and found ourselves with others in the same situation. We’d all been following the highway but had ended up stuck here, off the highway.

We were told, “You were all going the wrong way. That’s why you’re here.”

Going the wrong way? I’d been going straight, following the road. There wasn’t any other way to go. How could that be the wrong way? And, I protested, “It doesn’t make sense. The faster that I tried to go, the slower I went.” It frustrated me.

Another man agreed, saying, “Yeah, that’s what was happening to me.”

It seemed like I could learn more up a small hill. It was a paved white cement ramp. I started that way but people told me, “Don’t go that way. If you do, they’ll arrest you.”

But I wanted to see what was going on, and I thought that going up there could help.

“No,” others kept telling me, including a woman dressed in an official-looking uniform. “If you go up there, you will be arrested.”

A few others were going up there. From what I could see, they were being taken away.

I decided not to go up there. Staying where I was wasn’t working, though. I told my wife, “Come on, let’s get back in the car.”

“Where we going?” she asked as others asked me, “Where are you going? What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m going back down there.”

“But that’s the wrong way,” everyone said.

I said, “I know. But I’m going back down there, to where the wrong way began, and figure out how to get out of here.”

People were telling me not to go there, but I was adamant. I felt, being who I am, I could go back and figure it out, and fix the problem. With my wife with me in the car, I began driving backwards back down the road.

The dream ended.